Local School Buses Pause To Honour Daycare Victims
Written by Jeremy Zafran on 15 February 2023
Several school bus drivers in Kahnawake who were still on the road paused at 8:24 am this morning along with their counterparts in the region and observed a minute of silence in honour of the victims of last week’s deadly daycare bus crash. One of those was Carl Gilbert who has been driving a school bus in Kahnawake for 7 years:
“In honour of the little kids. I mean I carry grade 1 to grade 6, plus kindergarten and nursery and, you know, these little guys they don’t know what’s going on in the world and then something like this happens it’s heartbreaking. There’s just so much that you can do and just a little pause, seemed right.”
As a driver, Gilbert says there are a range of emotions felt when something like this occurs:
“From anger to outrage to shock. I really feel bad for the parents of the little kids and the ones who are friends with the little ones. They have a ton of questions now. Yeah, it affects you because we have the most precious cargo you can be carrying.”
Bus operators working for transit agencies in Laval, Montreal and Longueuil stopped driving at exactly 8:24 a.m. to pay their respects. It was exactly one week to the minute that two 4-year-olds were killed after a city bus was rammed into the Garderie Éducative Ste-Rose, a daycare in Laval’s Ste-Rose district. Six other children were sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
